Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members.
When contracting institutions are weak or exploitable, firms in developing countries rely on a mixture of social and formal heuristics to select business partners.
What is the effect of exposing motivated youth to firm management in practice? To answer this question, Abebe, Fafchamps, Koelle and Quinn (2019) place young professionals for one month in established firms to shadow middle managers.
This study (Carrillo, Donaldson, Pomeranz and Singhal, 2019) uses lotteries for public procurement contracts in Ecuador to understand the role that public procurement may play in fostering economic growth in developing economies.
The assignment of workers to tasks is an important feature of the organization of production within firms. Adhvaryu, Kala and Nyshadham (2017) study how task allocation across workers changes in response to productivity shocks.
Large and regular seasonal price fluctuations in local grain markets appear to offer African farmers substantial intertemporal arbitrage opportunities, but these opportunities remain largely unexploited.
Atkin et al. use tailored surveys and benchmarking in the flat-weave rug industry to better understand the shortcomings of standard productivity measures. Quantity-based productivity (TFPQ) performs poorly because of variation in product specifications across firms.
Economic growth requires confidence in the state's ability to enforce secure exchange. But when states selectively enforce rule of law, political considerations can moderate the trust that buyers have in sellers.
